Race in America After the Great Migration

A century ago, almost all black Americans lived in the South, largely in rural areas. By 1970, most lived outside the South, a great many in Northern and Western industrial cities. Driven, in part, by hopes for greater economic opportunity, millions of black migrants made this move. Did they find what they were looking for?

In ways, yes. Black workers in the North and West, in addition to experiencing greater social and political freedoms, made much more money than did their counterparts in the South. But there were also disappointments. Black migration to industrial cities was not met with steadily growing economic equality between black and white workers. (In fact, from 1940 to 2010, the earnings gap between the two groups in the North was virtually unchanged.) And as migration increased, so did black residential isolation — exacerbated by “white flight” to the suburbs — and eventually, economic stagnation. By 1970, seven out of 10 black Americans in Northern and Western cities resided in majority-black neighborhoods, which were often beset by high levels of poverty and crime.

Scholars in the early part of the 20th century had predicted migration would do more for black Americans than it did. What happened? In her rich and technical account COMPETITION IN THE PROMISED LAND: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets (Princeton University, $29.95), the economist Leah Platt Boustan employs the tools of her trade — resourceful matching of data sets, rigorous modeling of labor phenomena, sweeping use of census figures — to analyze the demographics and economics of the Great Migration as a whole. More traditional historians, often focusing on a single city (or a couple of cities) and relying on less nationally representative sources like oral histories and newspaper accounts, have not typically done this. Boustan does not aim to overturn the conventional explanation for sluggish black economic growth in the North: namely, the decline of American manufacturing and the persistence of racism in labor and housing markets. But here, as with many other aspects of the migration story, her investigation both deepens our understanding of what we think we know and adds new complexities and wrinkles.

For example, as the title of her book suggests, Boustan is interested in whether black economic progress in the North was hamstrung by labor competition between Southern-born and Northern-born black workers (a fear voiced as early as 1923 by W.E.B. Du Bois). She finds that between 1940 and 1970 (the years of heaviest migration) such competition did indeed lower wages for black men in the North — by $4 billion a year (in 2010 dollars), or 10 percent of their median earnings. Absent such competition, she argues, black workers already living in the North would have closed more of the earnings gap with white workers. She stresses, however, that this finding does not let racism “off the hook”: Black workers were competing with one another, as opposed to with white workers, sometimes because of discriminatory hiring practices that excluded blacks from jobs for which they were qualified — and sometimes (Boustan suggests even more often) because they were genuinely less qualified than similarly trained white workers on account of the lower quality of their schooling (itself a reflection of racial inequities).

As for the poor black urban neighborhoods that arose in the wake of the Great Migration, many of which are still characterized by various forms of disadvantage: What should be done? In his provocative book DARK GHETTOS: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform (Belknap/Harvard University, $29.95), the philosopher Tommie Shelby tackles this question. But he doesn’t lay out a jobs program or a housing initiative. Indeed, as he freely admits, he offers “no new political strategies or policy proposals.” What he aims to do instead is both more abstract and more radical: to challenge the assumption, common to liberals and conservatives alike, that ghettos are “problems” best addressed with narrowly targeted government programs or civic interventions. For Shelby, ghettos are something more troubling and less tractable: symptoms of the “systemic injustice” of the United States. They represent not aberrant dysfunction but the natural workings of a deeply unfair scheme. The only real solution, in this way of thinking, is the “fundamental reform of the basic structure of our society.”

This proposal may sound too ambitious to be of much relevance to everyday debates about how to help struggling urban neighborhoods. Shelby is asking for no less than an overhaul of our major political, economic and social institutions (roughly along the lines of those of a progressive Scandinavian country). Even if you agree that the ghetto poor are not merely disadvantaged but unjustly disadvantaged, you may still deem it wiser to focus on more immediate measures. But here is where Shelby’s argument becomes more germane: He contends that the injustice of American ghettos places certain moral constraints on what the government may do to try to improve them. In his view, for example, the state may not justifiably require people to work in order to receive welfare benefits. Likewise, the injustice of ghettos relaxes certain moral constraints, Shelby believes, on the behavior of the ghetto poor, some of whose otherwise blameworthy and punishable actions are, as he sees it, sound expressions of self-respect and legitimate resistance to an oppressive status quo. (He cites shoplifting, welfare fraud and tax evasion as examples.)

At the heart of these arguments is a simple principle: reciprocity. In a just society, you receive your fair share and contribute your fair share. But if you are born into a ghetto — with its social stigma, its poor schools, its go-nowhere jobs, its high levels of crime, drug use and incarceration — in what sense, Shelby asks, have you received your fair share, your equitable shot at life? And if society has not held up its end of the bargain, the least it can do, when trying to patch things up, is respect the autonomy and self-esteem of those it aims to help. A poor single woman in a ghetto may not have the resources to be an ideal parent, Shelby is willing to concede; but if that is ultimately a shortcoming of our society, it adds insult to injury to structure welfare benefits (as has been done in the United States) so as to discourage nonmarital childbearing — thereby hindering her reproductive freedom.

Similarly, Shelby does not deny that high jobless rates in ghettos are a problem. But if some of the ghetto poor choose not to work, he says, maybe that is because they “refuse to accommodate themselves” to their place in a social order where it is possible to work full time and still live in poverty. This refusal, he allows, may not be the most “constructive” basis of self-esteem or the purest ethic of resistance — but at least it’s something. Perhaps, he suggests, it’s something that will serve to make the ghetto poor active allies in a collective effort at fundamental change in the United States. Is a welfare program that mandates work justified in taking even this away? Another way of stating Shelby’s position is that even if, controversially, you were to grant a “culture of poverty” argument — that disrespect of authority, single-parent homes and reluctance to work are helping to perpetuate or worsen ghetto conditions — he would still oppose government efforts to coerce “better” behavior, out of respect for the autonomy, dignity and political resistance, however inchoate, of the wrongly oppressed.

Though Shelby’s “ghetto abolitionism” draws on the writings of such canonical liberal thinkers as John Rawls, in key respects it echoes a more radical text: the Black Panther Party’s 10-point platform and program, drafted by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966, which also conceived the problem of the ghetto as one not merely of poverty and racism, but also of more systemic economic, educational, labor, housing, criminal justice and heath care injustices. In THE REVOLUTION HAS COME: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Duke University, paper, $24.95), her detailed organizational history of the party, the historian Robyn C. Spencer reminds us that for the party’s leaders, it was critical that their platform be accessible, as Newton put it, to “the brothers on the block.” Like Shelby, they believed ghetto residents were crucial actors in any efforts at radical reform.